I awoke in the arms of Mother, who was walking down a city road. Looking around, I saw dozens of people brush, push and pull past eachother, and I heard shouts, cries, conversations, whispers, a mix of everything being said. I just wanted to go back to sleep. But it seemed I wasn't allowed to.

"Mom, what is brother's name?" Asked Olivia, looking up at Mother expectantly.

That woke me up a bit. What do I do? I'm sure that getting 2 names isn't something casual, or if it happens at all, and if it does its probably a 'noble' thing, where only those with 'noble blood' get it or something. And that means a lot of headaches. Nobles are always the worst to deal with. With any luck, nobody would know my full name, if that priestess was under an oath or- ahem, has met her deity.

"His name's Arret, sweety." Mother said, pulling Olivia's cheek. I would've breathed a sigh of relief if I wasn't mana breathing, which I have been doing since I awoke, skipping the usual phase of waking up where you don't know what was happening.

"Shtop it!" Olivia pulled away, rubbing her cheek while Mother smiled.

"When are we going to get to Aunty and Uncle?" Otto suddenly asked.

"Any minute now Otto." Mother replied, with a change in her voice.

I am surprised they are fine after what just happened, especially Olivia and Otto. I certainly aren't. I still remember the goblins, their weapons, their screeches, the blood- I felt as if a hammer hit my stomach, feeling it drop and tears almost come out. I... shall not think about it. More importantly, what did Otto mean by Aunty and Uncle?

We kept walking for another 30 minutes, with some light conversation going on, while I just watched the surrounding people. A definite plus of being a toddler is that I can stare at someone and they cannot judge me for it, I was a child after all. And I must say I was pretty disappointed looking around. It was the same as the village, just on a larger scale. The entire time I didn't see one weapon unless it was a guard or a bodyguard, who were following around a man that looked in the late teens. Must be a noble then. And I must say, unlike the fantasy stories I read, their swords were not strapped to their back.

Eventually we did stop in front of a house. By this point we were on the edge of the city, probably on the opposite side from where we disembarked, standing in front of a wooden 2 story house. What attracted my attention, however, was the building connected to it. They had a sign on top reading "Ferrar's Blacksmith", along with a lingering sense of heat and a smell of what I assume was what blacksmithing smells like. Not the best smell.

Mother knocked on the door, and then helf Otto's hand, her other hand holding mine. I decided I could walk the last few minutes, and I could feel my legs ready to give up. I really should exercise more. The door creaked open, and a large, burly, stereotypically looking blacksmith man stood in it. Mother spoke.

"Hello-"

"You." I didn't like how he said that.

"M-May we come in?"

The man moved out of the way and let Mother in. He looked at me.

"Who's child's that?"

Mother sent him a glare that would've killed him on the spot.

"Mine."

"Who you even get to do it with ya?"

"Its Ante's."

"****shit. Doesn't even look like him." I didn't understand that word fully, but it used the only swear word I knew, and i could fill in the gaps.

"Not in front of the children."

"Aint he dead as well?"

A silence descended on the room. Huh, who is Ante- wait. Wait wait wait. Is Ante... my dad? And he's dead? I... I... kinda don't care. Its weird how the human mind works; if you didn't know someone you wouldn't care if they die, compared to someone you did know, even if its still a life lost. Humans are inherently selfish, and I'm not different. Why should I care for someone I haven't met? And not only didn't meet, didn't do anything in my life, apart from conceiving me. Hell maybe even that wasn't true.

The silence was suddenly broken by someone entering the room. I turned and saw a woman in a stained apron and heavy boots, taller than the man, with thick arms, and muscles that looked like coiled snakes.

"Oh you've arrived."

"Ferrar, hello."

"Bring in your bastards too?" The woman said, nodding to us. Her mother just but her lip and didn't say anything.

"Got a bed for ya upstairs. They can sleep on the floor, got some rugs for them. Septem, show em upstairs."

The man, which I now realised had a beer belly, brought us upstairs, showing us a room. It was cramped, smaller than my old one. There was a bed in the corner along with a wardrobe next to the door and a nightstand. It seemed they were expecting us since the room looked cleaned. Mother thanked Septem, who left before returning with 2 pieces of fur. Mother put us on the bed along with the furs and then proceeded to talk to us.

"We're at Aunty's house now, so we have to go by their rules. Be responsible and don't break anything, please. From now I'll be helping her with her shop, so you'll be alone. Just talk with Septem, he is always downstairs, and try not to cause problems."

She then kissed us all on the forehead. Me and Otto stood by while Olivia and Mother prepared us for sleep. It was already dark outside, it seemed I slept for a long time, and to top it off I was still sleepy. Mother and Olivia were stuck on how to organise evrything until it was decided that we were to all sleep on the bed while Mother slept on the floor.

Once that was done, Mother told us to go to sleep and then closed the door, wishing us a good night. I knew it wasn't going to be a good night. This might be because I was stuck in between Olivia, who was next to the wall, and Otto, who was next to the edge, meaning I was getting uncomfortably warm. I moved around so that I was out from under the blanket and sat on top of it. Now I was getting too cold. I ignored that and thought of when I would be able to practice my magic in here. Olivia and Otto would most likely always be around, but I could already see Olivia leave for some sword lessons, while Otto go downstairs with Septem to do make some cloths whil I was alone upstairs, perhaps napping?

Now knowing my plan I plled some of the blanket above me, enough to keep me warm but not overheat me, and went to sleep.

...

Wait...

I sat up and placed my hands together and struck a pose like a villain realising everything was going wrong. This was because of one thing I realised: It seemed that in this world everything ran off of a matriarchal system, which was different from Earth mostly. On Earth the King seemed to have more power than the Queen in history most of the time, and the men had more rights than women. But here, it seemed almost opposite, women held more power. However it seemed it was more equal than on Earth, seeing men do stuff such as run a business, and vote (I remember that we had a mayoral election back in my village), which was a good thing. However I had a small concern. I planned to be a mage, which was definitely a position of power, and currently I have seen only one mage: Mother. Now, if women held more power, and the only mage I know of was a woman, excluding the knight because I didn't know their gender and I am not sure what I saw was even magic, that meant that maybe there will be more female mages than male mages.

Now that didn't mean anything to everyone but me. Why? Think about it: I am someone that got reincarnated into a world with magic, where female mages were more abundant, and is full of cliches. I'm an isekai main character in a cliche isekai world. I can already think of more than a few stories that match that description were the romance was more tightly mixed than when I mixed all the juice flavours together and then dropped mints into it when I was 7.

I just hope the cliches won't be that bad, because I wasn't ready for those mind games yet. The most concerning part was that I was being called cute every time someone talked to me, and I could they they weren't lying or saying that just because it was nice, because they kept looking at me. That wasn't a good sign and a clear example of foreshadowing.

This story doesn't have a harem tag does it?

I fell asleep.

...

Here is how a day would usually go past around me: Mother will wake up first, at around 6 or 7, then head out to help Aunt with the blacksmithing. Next to awake was Olivia, who will go downstairs and help Mother. Then Otto went downstairs to help Septem prepare some food for everyone, including myself. Then it was my turn to wake up. This information took a few weeks to piece together, needing me to wake up at different times and pretend to sleep again. As to why: i was bored out of my mind, especially before 2pm and after 5pm.

What I did was usually search around the house for books, usually when I finished the one I was reading. But at 2pm, when Otto, Olivia and Mother were all gone, I would do my tests. Something I discovered was that my mana breathing usually lead to cramp like pains sometimes when I tried to pour out mana. That sounded bad, because that meant I had to specifically change how I breathe when I do magic, but the keyword there was "sometimes". It either started to hurt the moment I try, or it doesn't hurt at all. It seems to correlate with the inhaling and exhaling of air, sometimes when I exhale the moment I pour ot mana, it begins to hurt, but when I inhale... it does the same thing! Then again, if I do it again, exhale when I use magi, it doesn't hurt! It is frustrating.

But that challange has kept me sane for months. It was like a game. I find out that I have a problem needing fixing, and I try to fix it only to find out i don't have the required knowledge to do so, then I do some tests, narrowing down what I have to find, and then I proceed to try and find them. This has been through raiding all book stashes in the house. It was all a fruitless endeavour mostly, but with each book my technique seems to improve. I quickly discarded Septem's books, because the only kind of advice they could give me was the "look within yourself and find the truth kind of advice" but frankly that stuff took way too much time to figure out. Ferrar's book stash contained better advice, being fighting forms. Now they seemed irrelevant, but I found that in some they mention a way to breath, to keep calm in situations or to help increase focus or other stuff. And I think I have found the answer.

The answer was: brute force. I didn't need to engineer a way to breath, try it, and when it doesn't work try something else. No, all I had to do was breathe, and keep breathing even when doing magic. Either of 2 things would happen: my breathing patterns will change slightly so it doesn't hurt or my mana is changed so it doesn't hurt. And I'm about to find out which one it is, because I have been going at it for almost 3 hours. The pain in my chest was making me only breathe around twice per minute, which didn't seem healthy.

I had to increase my lung capacity some way, but that came later. After it stops hurting. Wait... the pain stopped? I breathed and it hurt, but not because it created more pain, it was just echoing the pain used to being there. For 5 minutes I stood there, casting the candle spell then dissipating it over and over again, doing mana breathing. It didn't hurt anymore. I was going to throw my hands up and yell out in victory, but I just fell onto the bed, exhausted. I took the block of wood I swiped from the fireplace out of my mouth, seeing as I won't be shouting in pain anymore and needing a way to silence it.

Now it was time to increase my lung capacity. If I remember correctly, the blacksmith has a bucket filled with water used to cool the metal. I could swipe one of those...

...

Challange after challange, I filled the days. First it was mana breathing, then mana capacity, then improving my mana gathering. That took long, around a year, for me to complete to a satisfactory level. That was because I had to build onto my mana breathing. Mana breathing was used to increase mana capacity, while mana gathering was used to regain mana faster. When I first started to use mana breathing it made me gain more mana, but that was just because i was breathing more in, which I learnt was due to it being the first time my core opened. The hardest part and therefore the longest part of trying to gather mana faster was the fact I had no freaking idea on how to do it. But these challenges were kind of based on the fact I couldn't do something. Mana breathing churned my mana, stretching the mana core's wall. I guess that normal people would increase mana core size by using magic, therefore moving the mana inside and stretching the walls. But just like everything everyone could do, it was worse.

Now, mana still abided by some laws of the universe. Such as it moves from an area of high concentration to an area of low concentration, diffusing. Now, mana cores had a way higher density than ambient mana, usually, so that meant that it couldn't really diffuse. That means that, using my scientific knowledge, it had to use active transport for mana to go in. The mana core was under the heart and lungs, very close to them. The body used the lungs to intake mana, then spent some energy to make it go into the mana core. This made me not skip breakfast, lunch or dinner, as well as ask for extra bread, for a year. Now if only there was a way to make this process faster except using more energy. Make it so that it was easier to get inside the mana core. I had already used the "put more in" method when I expanded my breathing capacity by continously waterboarding myself. So I just made it easier for mana to go in by compressing my mana. Since mana is more like gas or plasma it can be easily compressed, and since I can control my mana to a certain degree I condensed it, but it didn't stay condensed. I had to repeatedly keep it condensed until it stuck, and then I compressed it more. Due to this, my mana shrunk in size and due to the mana vacuum around it, ambient mana diffused easily inside.

My mana may have decreased in size, but it still had the same mass, so my mana core expanded at the same rate, just not like clothes pushing against the walls of a washing machine and more like a bowling ball jumping around inside. And due to mana gathering I got more magic, and that means more mass which means faster stretching etc. This went on for about a week until I held my breath and concentrated. I condensed my mana further, making the mana particles bond. It turned into a liquid. And now I just had to fill my core. That took the rest of the year. Now my core was full of liquid mana, which only had some mana gas seep off of it. Now instead of condemning all of it tighter, I just condensed the liquid to one side of the mana core, making empty space which was quickly filled with mana, and then moved the liquid back again, absorbing and condensing the ambient mana taken in. Like a pump except I don't get rid of the air and instead condense it by compressing it.

Naturally, I didn't stop there and within the last week I made it spin at the same time. This made it strength my mana core and take in ambient mana at the same time as long as I kept breathing. Breathing was necessary not only to bring in mana but also to press against the mana core and make it easier to churn the mana. Now I could cast the candle spell indefinitely. And that wasn't a good thing, so I decided to change that. You see, while I was training my mana breathing and casting all the spells, I realised it got easier and easier to cast it. That made me think back to the ice magic my Mother cast, remembering how she didn't draw the circle. That was my next challange, but not only the candle spell. Oh no, I wanted to master all the spells I learnt to a degree faster than Mother. I wanted to do it to the speed at which that knight cast it, just a flash of the spell on the sword, not even a circle, and it was cast. That's what I wanted to reach: Instant Casting! I always read of it in books, and I decided that it must be possible, considering the cliches.

...

I ate the food, more sweet than usual, but that was natural, it was a a special event after all. I just turned 5 years old. And that meant that I would need to go to school starting March. The dreaded academy arc was a few months away, so might as well enjoy myself. Looking around me I saw Olivia to my right and Otto to my left. We were outside on a long bench, behind the house. This is where feasts took place, and my birthday was considered a type of feast. Considering that we used sugar in some of the food, it had all rights to be. Sugar seems to be a sign of wealth, so much so that only nobles get cake. I bet if they got a taste of French delicacy, however, they'd... lose their head. I chuckled to myself, almost choking on a piece of sweet bread. I looked at Olivia who was also eating, though much faster than me.

Olivia had grown a lot, and looked like she could lift the entire bench with everyone on it, yet her muscles weren't big or bulged. At least not yet. But I had seen what they could do, and that was mostly stab straight through a half metre thick piece of tree with a sword then proceed to bisect it. If I was being honest, Olivia had it the hardest out of all of us. I was still considered small and therefore not really responsible. Otto had started school a bit after we arrived at the city, starting 5 years late. Olivia had to study for an entire month before she could even go to school, due to missing almost a decade of education. Olivia was 9 when I got into this world. She was now 14 and already going to an academy. Otto was 5 when I got into this world, meaning he is around 10. He had to catch up to 2 years of school.

I felt bad for them; they don't have the knowledge of a college student. I wasn't worried about school, well not the academic side of school anyway. I took a look at Otto's homework and it was just some basic division. No, what worried me about school was the social side. Otto is leaving this year, meaning I have no one I know in school. Otto had it the same, but, unlike me, he seems to be good at social interaction. He was talking to his best friend right now: a dark skinned girl by the name of Ignis. She was planning to be an enchantress while Otto planned to be a tailor. Considering he had gotten all the questions right on his division homework, I'll say he would do just fine. I dont know what an enchantress even is, but they seemed to be heading to the same academy, so it must have something to do with art.

Academies were this world's versions of colleges. There was an academy for knights or adventurers aka combat which Olivia enrolled into. There was an academy for artistic crafts, such as tailoring and enchanting, apparently. I thought that would be taught at the academy I'm planning to go to: the magic academy. Saying it like that makes it sound really cheesy, but I didn't care. Its where they would teach me magic, if I exceed at school. I'm trying to be humble with that "if", but I dont think I'll have a problem. My problems lie with social stuff.

Oh and another bad thing about this whole academy thing was that Olivia now had to live on campus, being in the second division now. I asked about that, but Olivia said I won't understand. Guess I'll ask at school. However, this means that plan B for Beefy will be on hold for an indefinite amount of time. At least the combat part of it. For the body building part, well I had that covered. I was stronger than the average 5 year old, excluding my magic. I think. Wait what if all children are super buff or something? No, I'm just worrying too much... I hope.

I finished the sweet bread and began to talk Otto, who was talking to Ignis. He let me join their conversation about the art of clothing. Of course, my input consisted mostly of nodding. I was still kind of strict on the no speaking rule but I eased on it a bit. We kept talking about which best type of footwear went with a robe until it all stopped and I decided to ask Ignis a question.

"Ignis," I was allowed to call her by her first name because I'm a kid and she didn't seem to really care. "What is an enchantress?"

She grinned at me.

"An enchantress is only the best proffesion to have. You get to put magic onto clothes, a true art."

"But wouldn't that be taught at the magic academy?"

"It can be, but my enchanting isn't to help in combat! Its to become the most flamboyant and sparkling individual one can be! Its the best job at the arts academy." She confidently said, loudly.

"But you can't do that without any clothes, can you?" Said Otto.

Ignis laughed and I held my laughter too. Poor Otto, it took him a bit to realise what he said.

"You know that's not what I meant!"

Ignis kept laughing and I joined in. Maybe I should really ease up on the no speaking rule more.

One thing I realised in the city was that no one spoke about a Wave, which was strange. Was it stopped by those knights? I hope so, but my gut is telling me no. At least the fact that the wave has no impact here makes me feel safer. I dont want myself or anyone to go through what I have gone through.

We a finished our meal, had fun, and then went inside to sleep. Everyone brought over, being Ignis, 2 of Aunt Ferrar's friends and Olivia's master/tutor, were offered a place to sleep downstairs, blankets and furs already prepared for them. All of us, except Otto, went to sleep upstairs. In only a few months, school would begin for me, and with it the academy arc. Or did that come when I go to the academy?

...

The day arrived. Today I would be going to school, one by the name of... uh, I think it was something along the lines of City School or something generic like that. What was the city's name again? Utsa? It was Utsa City. Well, i think it was West Utsa City, considering Utsa was a County. I'm just trying to put it out of my mind. I'm very anxious, and my hands are trembling. Mother was walking next to me, leading me towards the building I could see from here. I was some normal looking clothes, nothing too poor or rich, just a shirt under a jumper and with trousers. My shoes were made of leather, though didn't look that expensive, because they weren't. I was wearing a bag, more like a sack than a bag, but it would hold all my books. It was handed down from when Otto used it before, with a few sews here and there to fix a hole.

We arrived at the gates, where most children, clearly older, passed straight in, while there was a group of people next to it, what I think was a teacher overseeing them. I think they're a teacher because they're the only adult without a child by her side. She looked old, but her hair was a vibrant auburn. Standing taller than most people around her, she told use to try and get into lines and then proceeded to shout names and hand out cards.

After a long time, everyone was in alphabetical order and were one by one made to walk out of our guarxians' hold and into a line that would take us into school. I was separated from Mother, and we high fixed befor I made my way to the line. After a minute there were no more children in the adult lines and we began to move in, our guardians all saying goodbye. Its almost like we were going into war, and that did not easy my anxiety. My mana began to churn faster than normal but I calmed down and looked forwards. We entered a building into an auditorium, where we were told to sit on the floor. After waiting a bit, a woman in her late 20s went on stage.

School had begun.